The two women who arrived at his clinic in Ukraine were “somehow different from all the other patients,” Dr. Andriy Kiselyov, a psychiatrist, remembered telling a colleague. They had a form of depression that did not respond to traditional treatment.
The women shared another trait. Both were returning from working as caregivers in Italy.
Soon, he started to notice that others who had returned were similarly affected. He and his colleague started informally referring to the malaise as the “Italy syndrome.”
That was 20 years ago in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, when, needing to feed their families, many women from across Eastern Europe migrated to Italy to fill its expanding need for elder care.
In the decades since, doctors across Eastern Europe have adopted the term, not as a scientific or medical diagnosis but as casual shorthand to describe caregivers’ psychological distress.
The term is now familiar to groups representing caregivers’ employers, and to the women who whisper among themselves about the insomnia, anguish and depression they feel after spending years away from their families tending to older, often disabled people abroad, in near-confinement with them.
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